What’s my country? Well, that’s complicated. Welcome to
the brave new world of foreignness, uncertainty and unbelonging.
By Tanya Pampalone
My father arrived in America in 1951, after selling the last
of everything the family owned to begin their new lives in New York. He had
grown up speaking Italian at home, French in school and Arabic on the streets. English
was one of the languages my dad didn’t know. He would have to learn a new way
to speak, a new way of life at 25 years of age.
They were a gypsy sort of family, roaming from Italy, to
Algeria, to Tunisia and, finally, America; first New York, then to California.
He was a third culture kid well before it became part of the global lexicon. I
suppose that was partially why my father was never quite clear about his
background. He never would readily admit to being Italian, despite our surname,
which was a dead giveaway and lead straight back to the Sicilian village of Calatafimi.
He would say we had a French/Italian background if pressed, adding that maybe
the reason he was so strict with his girls was that he had a bit too much Arab
in him.
“Can you put some goddamned shit on your ass?” he’d yell
after us when we tried to sneak out of the house in a mini-skirt in the
oppressive San Fernando Valley heat.
We would be American kids. None of my father’s four children
would learn speak Italian. My grandparents were the only ones who spoke to us
in the language, and they died when we were young. With his two sisters and younger
brother, he spoke French. But not to us. The last thing he needed was for his
children to be identified as poor, illiterate immigrants.
In the eighties, when Scarface
came out and everyone with any Italian heritage wore an Italian horn, my father
winced when he saw a golden one dangling from my sister’s neck. He would remind
us of where we were. “We are hamericans,” he would proclaim. And when I teased
him about his accent in my Valley Girlesque whine, he shot back: “Don’t you
give me that crap. You are the one with the goddamned haccent.”
Now it’s my daughter with the accent. She tells anyone who
will listen she’s American. Mostly because she knows that’s where Mickey Mouse
lives and, I suspect, finds it a bit exotic because wherever it is, it takes a
really long plane ride to get there. It’s also a place where a lot of strange people
kiss and hug her and give her sweets and clap when she does anything, including
complicated things like tossing a ball or smiling.
Not that she remembers much about America. We’ve been back
in Johannesburg for five years and she’s only returned once. She speaks with a South
African accent, one that makes her American cousins giggle when she talks with
them on Skype.
But my daughter also has Czech to add to her cultural CV. My
husband, who I met in Prague not long after graduating from university, is
South African by way of Czech parents. He left his birth country in his young
mother’s arms on a train in 1970, his father on holding on to his six-year old
sister. It was two years after the Prague Spring and his father refused to stay
with the communists. So they defected, closing the doors on their life, their
home and their extended family. When they arrived in Vienna with a few Czech
crowns and a small bar of gold, they walked from embassy to embassy trying to
get asylum. The South Africans were the first to accept, and a few days later
they traded communism for apartheid and took up residence in a tiny room in a cockroach-infested
Hillbrow hotel.
Depending on whom he’s talking to, my husband will declare
that he’s Czech or South African. This appears to be especially convenient in
any kind of sporting situation. But he speaks Czech like a child and his
cultural link is limited to special occasion knedliky (dumplings) and zeli
(sauerkraut), along with predilection for Czech beer.
His parents, after more than 40 years in Southern Africa, which
took them from Hillbrow to Parkview to Northcliff, then Francistown and,
finally, a sprawling single level home with a pool and a tennis court in Randburg,
are now selling up and returning to the Czech Republic. Their rand will go further
there. They will get a small flat, socialised healthcare and a Czech pension. Well
into their sixties, with their Czech-laded English, they will head back with their
South African-laden Czech and become strangers yet again in a very different
country than they left.
When I went back to California recently and asked the woman
behind the till at a dress shop if she would throw away my cash slip in the
“rubbish bin”, she smiled and asked with a thick Spanish accent, “Where are you
from?” I chuckled to myself.
In South Africa I am a foreigner, too. I always couch my
existence here by saying my husband is South African. I have my built in
defense when people ask why I’m here. I feel bad for those immigrants that
don’t have marriage to hang their intrusive immigrant heads on. In general,
most South Africans are like most middle Americans. They are happy to see you
for a while, glad you are appreciating their country and all, but you better be
on your way.
Earlier this year in Arizona, a stringent immigration law
was passed to “identify, prosecute and deport” those illegally in the country.
I wonder who will be the ones that “look” foreign in America. We are all a
bunch of foreigners, save the Native Americans. That was the whole point of
giving us your tired, your hungry, your poor.
In South Africa, we have the most asylum seekers in the
world, according to United Nations High Commission on Refugees. And xenophobic
hatred simmers from the boardrooms to the townships. After all, what are all of
us foreigners doing here taking South African jobs?
In some ways, South Africa is much like America. Growing up,
my friends’ parents were from all over – Armenia, Argentina, Mexico, Lebanon,
Morocco, France, England – and immigrants from Central America, Thailand, Korea
and Iran were commonplace. Here in South Africa, my two last employers have
been foreigners: one a Serbian, the other a Zimbabwean. Our new neighbours are
Canadian by way of Bangladesh, and my daughter’s best friend has a Dutch mother
and a South African father from Polokwane.
The other day I met a lawyer from the US who has four
children, all raised in South Africa; his oldest is now at Columbia University
in New York. I dream of my own daughter going to the University of California,
Berkeley and fantasise she will arrive speaking fluent Zulu and French and
conversational Mandarin. These are my dreams, not hers, and who knows where
she’ll end up. But I do know this: if she heads back to the land of her birth,
she will be a foreigner in a foreign land just like me. My daughter, despite
what her passport says, will be a South African.
Part of being from different places really means you are of
none. Your sense of self is fragmented. You know the politics of San Francisco,
the panelaks of Prague, the highways of Los Angeles, the malls of Rosebank. You
know nothing in its entirety and unconnected strands of everything at the same
time. Your memory mixes and fades and your sense of self and attachment to
culture, tradition, family and place are a mirage. You reach out for something
firm, something to believe in, something that has existed and will always exist
and it dissipates as you wave your hand. There is a base – the constitution of
your father and mother that is your very skin – but different places, different
people make for different ideas.
And nothing is certain. Certainly not the weather. Not
capitalism. Not democracy, not tradition, not the merging, mixed cultures and
ethnicities and religions. Globalisation and third culture kids are the present
and the future; mutts, all of us, borders shifting, allegiances wavering.
My father used to say your country is where you can support
your family. Joseph Oliver Pampalone was American, as red-blooded as they get.
When he left Tunisia, he didn’t look back. And he never returned. He always
said he wanted to remember it as it was.
The remnants of their life in North Africa are scattered
throughout my aunts’ homes and my mother’s; the engraved copper tea set, the
worn tapestry of an Arab family in the desert making cous cous, the soft
leather poofs, carefully preserved photographs of my aunts at the beach,
friends dressed in Arab garb, my father drinking tea on what was then Avenue Jules
Ferry.
What is my allegiance? I don’t really know. I have never
even been able to choose a God, let alone live in a home, aside from the one I
was raised in, for more than a couple of years. I am American. It’s what my
passport says. For now, my country is South Africa. But where on the map will I
live out my old age? About that I’m not at all certain.
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Tanya Pampalone is the features editor of the Mail & Guardian, and the founder of
xpat.co.za, a website for foreigners living in South Africa.
